Companies using old core samples to pinpoint new reserves
For Al Bowman, the Turner Valley oilfield is not a “historic” resource; it’s his bread and butter, the oil-and-gas-producing machine that keeps paying his regular wage.
“It’s been an amazing oilfield,” said the 62-year-old, hosting a tour of the Little Chicago Gas Plant and adjacent sour oil battery he tends under contract for Calgary-based producer Legacy Oil + Gas Inc. “It’s a good little plant. Runs like a top.”
The resident of the hamlet of Naptha, a few kilometres south of the town of Turner Valley, says his grandfather came from England in 1928 to work as a steam engineer on the early cable-tool drilling rigs. His father entered the oilfield workforce in 1938.
Bowman was born in the Turner Valley hospital and went to school in the once-booming town of Royalties — neither exists anymore. Where he works now is right across the road from the empty farmland where Royalties, nicknamed Little Chicago, once stood. He’s been working in the Turner Valley field, off and on, since 1973.
Signs and places change frequently in the oilfield but the people often remain the same.
Legacy’s Turner Valley field superintendent, Dave Grenwich, for instance, has worked for four different companies since he came on board as an electrician in 1991 with Pembina Corp., owned by Calgary’s Mannix family.
When Talisman Energy Inc. bought Pembina in a corporate takeover in 1997, Grenwich came along. Talisman sold the assets to privately owned CanEra Resources Inc., which owned it for less than a year before selling, in 2010, to Legacy.
Vertical wells drilled in the 1940s continue to reliably deliver oil, gas and water, some still producing as much as 85 barrels per day, said Grenwich. Legacy’s new wells are primarily horizontals, designed to give maximum exposure to the somewhat depleted and underpressured reservoir.
He believes the field will continue to produce for many years, even if every patch of land has been perforated with wells. From a windswept vantage point on Longview Hill, he points to well pads from which horizontals extend underneath the village of Longview.
“The next phase for Turner Valley, once the infill drilling phase is over, will be enhanced oil recovery,” he said. “There will come a time when there’s no room left for infill drilling.”
The Turner Valley structure is a Rundle formation marked by anticlines created by the same folding of the Earth’s crust that created the Rocky Mountains — the folding created traps for oil and gas migrating from lower source rock.
Currently, Calgary intermediate Legacy Oil + Gas is the most active company on the 12,000 hectares overlying the pool southwest of Calgary, with 85 to 90 per cent working interest in four of five of its ownership units.
Legacy president and chief executive Trent Yanko said he jumped at the opportunity when a chance came to buy into the play.
“We saw an extremely large pool — it’s got 1.3 billion barrels of oil originally in place — but it was only at a 12 per cent recovery factor,” he said.
“There’s a huge resource in the ground that still hasn’t lived up to its full potential. It was a non-core asset for a long time that didn’t fit into Talisman’s strategy and others. It’s like the world’s oldest teenager, still just getting into its prime because it hadn’t seen the capital (investment).”